If thing A is important enough to declare a "code yellow" in order to ignore things B, C, and D to focus on A, then were B, C, and D really that important? Could you have focused your team on A from the start, making a "code yellow" unnecessary? (Hint: yes, you could have, so the question should be why you didn't, and whether you could have seen it coming.)<p>I've seen this happen a lot with mediocre leaders. "Code Yellow" equivalents happen because they weren't able to understand that A was really the most important thing, typically because B, C, and D were important for optics or politics, but not genuinely important to the customer or the problem at hand.<p>A "Code Yellow" is a useful political tool to move an organization to focus a bit more on problem solving by saying "I don't care about your politics, your org charts, whatever, just solve the damn problem." In that sense, it really does work.